>Do you believe that the patriotic affinity between Canadians is somehow lesser than that between Germans, because we don't share a well-defined genetic heritage?
Lesser patriotic affinity for minorities? Absolutely.
(I am Canadian)
There's even a study[1] showing that with increasing diversity, you get:
Lower confidence in local government, local leaders and the local news media.
Lower political efficacy – that is, confidence in one's own influence.
Lower frequency of registering to vote, but more interest and knowledge about politics and more participation in protest marches and social reform groups.
Higher political advocacy, but lower expectations that it will bring about a desirable result.
Less expectation that others will cooperate to solve dilemmas of collective action (e.g., voluntary conservation to ease a water or energy shortage).
Less likelihood of working on a community project.
Less likelihood of giving to charity or volunteering.
Fewer close friends and confidants.
Less happiness and lower perceived quality of life.
More time spent watching television and more agreement that "television is my most important form of entertainment".
It would be instructive to compare Switzerland here. They are famously made up of German, French and Italian speaking parts. (And a fourth language that nobody cares about. And lots of immigrants these days from all over Europe.)
You are trying to dress up your genocidal thoughts of the German people as something politically correct and inclusive.
Try to make the same exercise with the Aboriginal Australians: It doesn't matter if they don't reproduce; there's plenty of whites around to take their place.
I'm confused about your reference to Australian Aboriginals. The majority of them were decimated by disease and out right violent attack from whites... how are either of those scenarios relevant here?
All the domains used to crumble in face of the leftists. They went after individuals and tried to get them fired. They virtue-signaled even in Github repos. https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015
Everyone who wasn't inclusive enough got attacked. You career was in jeopardy if you ever dared to think something a little outside the norm.
Politics, scifi, comedy, STEMs... Every and all domain fell.
Except gamers. Gamergate was when everything changed. This is when being more-progressive-than-thou stopped working.
The pendulum stopped moving left.
To anyone who's been paying attention (and old enough to understand), this was a major event.
Everything since then was just going through the motion. An immense building crumbling down while everyone inside it is trying to get to the top. "I'm more tolerant than you; I accept trans in my bathroom!"
If you are even slightly interested in history and sociology, you should be very attentive to the next few months/years.
As a more libertarian/right-wing individual, it is a glorious thing to see.
I just hope that the leftist didn't push the pendulum so far that it's going to come back with a vengeance and destroy everything it its path.
>Are you implying here that curiosity and intellectual abilities are genetically inheritable ?
Intelligence as we can measure it (IQ) is highly related to genetics (so you can say inheritable). IQ is correlated to 0.86 in case of twins raised in the same family, or 0.76 in twins raised appart.
> If so, what stops eugenics from being morally indefensible ?
Nothing!
I myself have spinal muscular atrophy and know that my children could have a chance of having it if the mother is carrier of the bad gene.
It would be wise for me to chose someone who isn't a carrier (or even undergo a gene therapy, once it will be available).
Why do you think eugenics is indefensible? Because some people were sterilized in the name of it? That's only one approach. You could also have eugenics designed to increase the number of 'quality' people. Say, for example, giving money to people with an IQ higher than 150 to make more children. Or those with amazing athletics skills, or amazing beauty... I don't care at this point, it's only for the sake of the argument.
You could also say that eugenics increases the chances of your children finding a quality mate, because they are more numerous when the state is subsidizing them.
Anyhow, we are animals and our evolution follows the same rules as all the other species. If we don't purposefully decide where our evolution will bring us, nature will do it for us. Without any external fitness function, those who can reproduce the most will be the evolutionary winners. Ask yourself: are those taking care of establishing a good career and establishing a solid financial foundation the ones with the most children?
> You could also have eugenics designed to increase the number of 'quality' people. Say, for example, giving money to people with an IQ higher than 150 to make more children. Or those with amazing athletics skills, or amazing beauty...
And have a world full of Aspergers and Schizos (correlated with IQ) or some giant mutants unable to survive the next asteroid strike. I hope you get the point - we have no idea what we are doing.
Schizophrenia may (or may not) correlate on the phenotype level, but genetically, they are inverses. Genetic risk for schizophrenia lowers IQ in GCTAs, genetic correlation, and family studies. If you select for intelligence, you will get less schizophrenia, and if you select against schizophrenia, you will get more intelligence.
I don't know about Schizophrenia, but I think a world with more high-IQ people with Asperger's wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing.
I mean, I'm not a proponent of the (semi-serious?) thought that "aspies are the next step in human evolution", but since I was diagnosed myself recently, I've found myself imagining what such a world would be like every once in a while...
Anyways, I'm all in favor of some forms of 'eugenics' as our knowledge about the effects increase. We've been helping our own evolution along for quite a while now, so I don't see why tinkering with our genes should somehow be completely off-limits.
You say that like being an Aspie is bad. Of course IQ genes don't as far as we know have bad side effects. It seems Fischerian, and actually uncorrected to ASD.
A lot of people say "Aspie" when they really just mean "socially mal-adjusted turbo nerd." It happens that lots of smart people are generally nice and can read a room. You just don't hear about them because they aren't constantly talking about their IQ.
Sure, but it's not like we can just sit on our hands and wait until we are 100% sure of what we could do; the welfare state is already selecting for us. And in my experience, most people are opposed to getting rid of the welfare state.
This means that the choice is not "eugenic or do nothing", it's "eugenic or dysgenic".
This is a short-term effect, and you have the fitness function backwards.
The portion of the population that takes action to avoid living in squalor is unfit because they fail to reproduce well enough for replacement. Meanwhile, the portion of the population that fails to avoid squalor is breeding in a most exponential way. That portion was historically kept in check by death, but now has been unleashed.
So one type of person is on the way to extinction, and another type is growing without bound. Currently this means the the total population (both groups together) is shrinking, but that will change.
I see a myriad of threads about interviews on HN. They all say that you can't really code in an interview. You don't have your favorite tools nor any real projet or familiarity with a codebase. These threads will say that the interview should, at most, be there to help you see if there's a culture fit.
Now you have an interview where the guy asked questions that aren't related to programming and everyone is up in arms. Maybe it's because he did his homework? Maybe he already checked M. Adeagbo work and decided he wanted him in the company?
So now I suppose the interview isn't supposed to be used to check if someone is a good programmer... but it also shouldn't approach any subject that is emotional, because by gosh you wouldn't want to know how someone will react on a sensitive subject.
You guys must have the weirdest social interactions ever. Within an hour of meeting someone I usually "size" them by throwing curved ball designed to see what makes them ticks. That is exactly what I would expect in a well designed interview, especially if you are looking for culture fit.
Frankly, I find that these questions are well designed. Look at how I immediately answered them:
>“Why do all the Black kids sit at the same table at school?”
"Same reason Asians or Whites will do the same thing under the same conditions."
What can we deduce? Not much, except that I'm aware of basic biology/human behavior. Better luck in the next question...
>“Why is it no longer okay to say nr?”
"It is okay, but you need to be of the correct race... and apparently that's not racist. (with a hint of sarcasm)"
Bingo! Now you known that when I talk of sexism and racism, I use the dictionary definition, NOT the new "minorities can't be sexist/racist" version.
And just like that, you know if I'm a good fit. (If it's in SF, probably not...)
>"/dev/color is a community of black software engineers who help one another reach career goals."
This is literally a racist club. ---> A group who discriminates based on race.
Now, I have nothing against that... but you can't say a word if white clubs are created.
Well yes. Just like the USA isn't all people always doing evil things despite Abu Graib (sp?), special rendition, Guantanamo, ... Oscar Schindler was a Nazi too and some Allies committed atrocities just as some Nazis did.
While your business might be your life, for most of your employees it's only a job.
This means that for most of them, it must be pleasant. They must be able to joke around and even, occasionally, flirt. If you try to turn every social interaction into a perfectly professional unfriendly and unsexualised environment, you will very quickly find that you are the only one left.
This is even more relevant in a small startup.
In my experience, the worst kind of work environment is a startup trying to act like a big multinational. None of the perks, but all of the soulless experience.
I have nothing against firing someone for bad behavior.
However, with the little info you provided us, there is nothing serious.
Make sure the new employee knows that her colleague didn't like his approaches and that it won't happen again.
You should also try to get both sides of the story.
Finally, you did say this:
> The employee in question has made it clear that it's not a big deal and she knows how to deal with it (...)
How is she going to react if you fire his ass? Wouldn't it be acting like she can't take care of herself?
> How is she going to react if you fire his ass? Wouldn't it be acting like she can't take care of herself?
You know, it occurs to me you can't have this both ways: take care of yourself and rat out the fiend to the boss above.
"Hello, 911? There is a robbery at Elm and 41st. But don't send anyone, I can take care of these dudes! One of the perpetrators saw me using my phone, so if police arrive, they will know it was me! And that scares me --- that's how much I can take care of this myself!"
If you don't want some authority to take action, don't burden them with the conflict of the knowledge and the request not to take action.
I think I'm in the middle in this issue. On one hand the guy is new, and went pretty far on this one. On the other hand you are hiring human beings and you can't completely stop flirty behaviors (I remember reading about the percentage of Americans who meet their spouse at work and it was pretty high).
So few information, but so many people ready to fire his ass.
At this point, I wonder if we should have men/women segregation in the workplace. This is the logical conclusion if you want to avoid this kind of problems.
> I wonder if we should have men/women segregation in the workplace.
That assumes all of your employees are heterosexual.
Once you assume some employees may be homosexual, bisexual, non-binary, asexual, etc. you quickly get a graph where employees are nodes are edges are "could possibly have unwanted attraction towards" that is not bipartite.
I think that people in the USA tend to make extreme reactions with known 'social problems'.
Racism lead to an overreaction and abuse from the minorities in _some situations_ [i'm not saying that racism is dead, all I'm saying is that sometimes you spot an overreaction to something].
Sexual harassment lead to this.
If anyone is building a team, the best way to deal with this is to discuss it with the team, and draw a clear line in the sand of what is tolerated and what isn't.
OP: I cannot judge by the information you have given me if this was inappropriate conduit or not, present that info to someone else who is going to be honest to you (you should have a friend or two like that that won't simply pander to you if you're building a company, also, present that without bias)
You being upset might be for a number of reasons.
Then, if it was inappropriate, ask for a lawyers advice to see if this it is ok to do the following: talk with the team and say what is inappropriate and what isn't and what is going to be tolerated and what isn't going to be tolerated, ask their opinion on those guidelines and be flexible on those according to what you hear.
You have a pretty strong opinion in this thread considering the lack of information we have.
In this particular reply, all the 4 things you mentioned are NOT happening in the story. (At least by what we know.)
Unwelcome: We don't know if it was unwelcome. She even agreed to move to another communication medium (one which wasn't officially work related.)
Overt: It was on their own time, on a completely distinct communication medium. I don't see how more COVERT it could be.
Repeated: Again, from what we know, this was on a single weekend. He called her a milf, asked if he could tell her a secret and she refused. That's it. If he's not asking again and again, it's not repeated.
Workplace sexual advances: That's not in the workplace, nor on the company's time.
There's not much we can conclude without knowing more.
She made it clear to the FOUNDER that the conduct was unwelcome. Did she tell it to the new employee? Did he repeatedly talk to her in the same manner after being told it was unwelcome? We don't know.
I have no problem calling a coworker an "asshole", especially on my own time while taking a beer with him.
Without context, that the new employee said "milf" doesn't convey anything other than he found the lady sexually attractive. His seducing techniques might be abyssal, or she might be the kind of girl that likes a little spices.
Again, we don't have near enough information to make a judgement here.
The problem here is that in a workplace you are thinking about whether his seduction technique is abysmal or whether she "likes a little spices". THAT'S THE PROBLEM. By definition, things have gotten dreadfully unprofessional -- especially from your end.
"Well, I just figured I'd grope you because you might like it, and it is after 5 pm..."
Of course things were unprofessional, it happened on the weekend on Snapchat. What did you expect?
"Subject: possible sexual intercourse
--- Good morning Miss, We met earlier today at Acme corp. I wanted to bring to your attention my desire to meet you in the goal to have intercourse. Please answer before 5pm. You can reach me on my cellphone.
Regards, Mr. X"
The more I think about it, the more I realize that the boss has no responsibility. He might want to intervene if the relationship is influencing their work performance, but that's all.
If there wasn't anything wrong with it (in her mind) - it never would have made it to the founder.
What happens when you don't fire the guy? Say later on, for whatever reason, SHE has a bone to pick with the company. Now the FOUNDER is the guy who got a harrassment case and "didn't take it seriously". What's the founder's responsibility to protect his company? Don't see how he needs that risk.
She explicitly brought it to the boys, which means it is impacting the work environment. You are responsible for the work environment of your employees, including for addressing known low-leveling issues before they become higher-level issues perhaps involving other employees from the ones involved in the earlier issues.
Which is why you need to consult an employment lawyer and/or your internal HR expert.
Lesser patriotic affinity for minorities? Absolutely. (I am Canadian)
There's even a study[1] showing that with increasing diversity, you get:
Lower confidence in local government, local leaders and the local news media.
Lower political efficacy – that is, confidence in one's own influence.
Lower frequency of registering to vote, but more interest and knowledge about politics and more participation in protest marches and social reform groups.
Higher political advocacy, but lower expectations that it will bring about a desirable result.
Less expectation that others will cooperate to solve dilemmas of collective action (e.g., voluntary conservation to ease a water or energy shortage).
Less likelihood of working on a community project.
Less likelihood of giving to charity or volunteering.
Fewer close friends and confidants.
Less happiness and lower perceived quality of life.
More time spent watching television and more agreement that "television is my most important form of entertainment".
[1] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9477.2007....